Homing Devices

Oct 1, 2009

When James Bond wanted to track Goldfinger, he pushed a button on his Aston Martin's dash and watched his prey's every move on a primitive portrayal of a GPS map. Now, 42 years later, Q's technology is making a comeback: So-called 'friend finder' services are finally becoming widespread—at least enough for the NYTimes Circuits section to pick up on the trend.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

We covered this last year in our roundup of new technologies made possible by smaller and more powerful GPS chips, including friend-finder services marketed to parents who want to keep track of their children. Wherify wireles has been marketing their GPS enabled, kid-friendly phone for several months now, and, according to the Times, Verizon plans to get in the act of kid-tracking, along with Sprint-Nextel and Disney.

Friend-finders, and the technological subset, Geofencing, are nothing new—they've been fairly popular in Europe and Japan—but have faced a challenge in the U.S. because of privacy concerns. The technology is even older: A marriage of cheap GPS chips and wireless data services, location-aware cell phones have been around for years. In fact, cell phones are one of the leading applications of GPS chips.

Friend-finders work by sending your location information to a friend's (or group of friends') cell phone and vice-versa. If you want to find out who's in town, poll your buddy list. Other basic features of friend-finders include automatic notifications when you come within a certain distance of someone else—eliminating (finally) the central plot device of an entire romantic comedy genre: The just-missed connection.

And there's much more to come: Expect an explosion of location based services this year such as routing programs and friend finders on cell phones, as well as on traditional GPS units. —Benjamin Chertoff

The Wherifone allows parents to track their children.

GPS receivers have a tough time indoors, where few satellite signals penetrate. One solution cellphones emlpoy is Assisted GPS, which uses data collected from cellular towers to help determine location. The towers relay satellite data; some also provide their own signals, which can be used for rough triangulation. Illustration by Flying-Chilli.com

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Popular Mechanics participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.